What My Reiki Master Taught Me by Waiting Mark Straubel is a longtime student of Brian Brunius and is preparing for his Reiki Master initiation. He recently sent Brian this reflection on some of what he has learned during their years together. As I get closer to my Master initiation, I keep coming back to…
Why Traditional Reiki Treatment Uses Touch Reiki is a hands-on practice. That’s really the whole point, and it’s one of the things that seems to surprise people today. In Japanese, teate refers to treatment or care and literally contains the characters for “hand” and “apply.” Early Reiki practitioners also used the term teate ryoho, or hands-on…
There is a small parable near the front of Tomita Kaiji’s 1933 book on Reiki, Reiki and the Benevolent Art of Healing (Reiki to jinjutsu: Tomita-ryū teate ryōhō), and it is a story about why books don’t work. A king walks into a shop looking for texts on how to become a better ruler. An…
How Amilcar Escobar followed a question about Reiki into the water and found the work that was waiting for him there. There is a tradition in our Reiki lineage that every Master Candidate undertakes a Master Project near the end of training. The subject is not assigned by the teacher. It grows out of a…
You hear it a lot now — that hand placement doesn’t really matter in Reiki, that the energy goes where it’s needed, so you can put your hands wherever feels right. I understand why people say it. But it doesn’t line up with how the practice was actually taught. Not long ago I heard a…
If you have watched the news recently, you have probably experienced a familiar feeling. War continues in one part of the world while political division deepens in another. Communities become increasingly polarized, families find themselves separated by ideology, and environmental concerns seem to grow larger each year. The problems are so numerous and so interconnected…
We live in a culture that constantly pulls our attention outward. Notifications, noise, urgency, overstimulation — many people move through daily life without ever fully settling into themselves. Over time, this can create a feeling of internal distance. It’s not necessarily a dramatic disconnection, but a subtle one. A feeling of being constantly “on,” mentally…
One of the strange things about Mount Kurama is that almost nothing on the mountain mentions Reiki. People arrive expecting otherwise. After all, this is the mountain associated with Mikao Usui’s retreat in 1922. Reiki practitioners come from all over the world imagining there will be giant monuments, museums, sacred markers, or at least signs…
There is a quiet problem in modern Reiki practice. Most people learn techniques. They learn hand positions, symbols, and ways of treating others. But the foundation of the system is often unclear. Practice becomes inconsistent. Understanding remains partial. Over time, many practitioners feel that something is missing, even if they cannot name it. What is…
Most Reiki practitioners have never trained the way Usui intended. They place their hands. They learn techniques. They may even teach. But the disciplined structure that shaped perception, conduct, and stability in early Reiki training is largely absent from modern practice. In Usui’s system, training was not built around a single method, but around a…